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I struggled for a while really when the need to convert drawing to digital format arose. Being an Artist, it is really getting essential to get ourselves and our art online and sometimes really important to create vector files that are scale-able.

When I started workinig digitally, i right away started with working directly through illustrator and Learned the Basics of Vector to get started. If you have a blog or shop or website where you would like to sell your digital artworks ( Read my post on How to sell art online here ) or maybe just plainly want to transfer your work into digital format to color it digitally , first thing first , you need to get it into a line work that is digitally supported.

For digital Artwork , or maybe coloring pages you need to have a clean and crisp black and white line. Here is a little tutorial for really novice artists who would like to do that.

1-Draw Clean and Bold

Draw with pencil or directly whatever is comfortable for you , keeping in mind that what you are drawing will be scanned and digitally modified and manipulated. More crisp and clean line you have easier it becomes to convert drawing to digital format.

I like to start my drawing with pencil , once I am done with the basic idea , I like to switch directly to a black Fine tipped marker to fill in the details. As I don’t like to rework on my details 🙂 . So it is totally up to you how you draw but the lines must be Clean and Bold .

The tools I use for drawing are

2-Importance of Right Tools

Nothing can be worst than finishing your pre sketch with pencil and when you start drawing you realize that your sharpie or marker is out of ink!.

Make sure that you have a well-filled marker that gives clean edges. Rough edges means MORE touching up after the artwork is digitally altered.

3- Scan high res

I like to scan my artwork on high resolution , you can ALWAYS go down but you cant go up and scale a pixel image . Also i like to keep my scanner settings to colored and NOT BLACK AND WHITE. Black and white scans give a line contrast that is too much to handle and doesn’t give a smooth line in a final black and white image.

4-Adjust Curves and Brightness.

Finally in Photoshop you can adjust the Curves and play around with the brightness and contrast to get a clean and crisp image quality.

5-Vactorize!

Last but not the least , you can copy your final clean image Ctrl+A (select all) and place Ctrl+V (Paste) into illustrator and then trace it !

Result is a clean crisp outline that you can scale to any size you like WITHOUT LOOSING its line quality. Some additional steps you might want to take after the vactorization step is complete is to convert it to outline and clean the white area . I have explained cleaning the outlines in another post that you can Read about Right here.

Chevron stripes have always been in fashion , and i don’t remember seeing anything with chevron stripes that doesn’t look good ! have you? . And when it comes to creating vector chevron patterns in illustrator it cant be easier than this and below i will tell you how.

I have earlier talked about some Premade vector patterns brushes that you can easily apply to a line in illustrator . And create instant effect of various chevron lines .

OR

if you are not at all familiar with What are vector brushes you can check out these posts of mine about vector patterns illustrator.

[private]Here is a very very quick and simple tutorial showing you how just using the most basic tools of illustrator you can create a Character in a matter of few minutes. This little guy has been named ” the mummy” and is an exclusive character of the family of Boxterz** characters.

First of all the preview of what we will be creating.

PREVIEW

STEP 1

Start off by creating a simple square , using the square shape tool while pressing shift create a perfect square and color it a light blue color.

STEP 2

Next use the mesh tool (U) and create a mesh node anywhere you like and , now using the direct selection tool (A) select the central node and color it a lighter shade.

STEP 4

Pretty obvious what i did here , one more black and two more white circles.

STEP 5

Using Pen tool create a smily little mouth

TIP : to join end points select both point and hit CTRL+J

STEP6

Use rounded rectangle tool and create three teeth side by side.

STEP 7

Using Pen tool(P) draw a gradient filled shape , i start randomly and keeping it a bit rough kept on wrapping up my mummy boxter.

STEP 8

Free hand drawing using pen tool continues.

STEP 9

DONE!

**Boxterz is a collection of whimsical boxed characters which are my new line of illustrations registered and ready for licensing , for licensing inquiries please contact me .The Character is registered please do not copy or distribute for commercial usage , all rights reserved.

1. Go to: FILE>OPEN>and open up any of the frames that you would like to use as an overlay , here i browsed and opened up a frame from the calender photoshop brushes set (remember? facebook fans received it for free? still free to download through the store)

When you have opened the png You will see some Grey and white boxes behind around the frames don’t be alarmed since it is a png file this area means it is transparent.

i chose to use this frame go ahead right click and save it to your disk if you want.

Frankly speaking i never did explore the power of point , except for creating once in a while backgrounds for presentations for my work . Which in fact is fun and quite rewarding . But using it as a drawing tool? never quite thought of it until Tom Kuhlmann created a similar power point tutorial version of one of my previously written tutorial How to create an envelope icon with a satin Feel

This is how my version’s outcome looked like and below is Tom’s Version created entirely in PowerPoint

Tom also shares a video and step by step tutorial on his site Go take a look![/private]